The first self-propelled road vehicles
Steam power came to the road before any other engine did, partly because steam engines were the main source of mechanical power in the eighteenth century. The earliest working road vehicle usually named is the “fardier à vapeur” built by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot in France around 1769, a three-wheeled steam tractor meant to pull artillery. It carried its boiler ahead of the front wheel, which made it hard to steer, and it could run only for short periods before needing to build up steam again. Cugnot’s vehicle was an engineering curiosity, not a business, but a surviving example is displayed in a Paris museum.
The earlier Newcomen engine and the atmospheric engine concept were too large and heavy for road use. A key change was James Watt’s separate condenser in the 1760s and, after about 1800, the use of high-pressure steam, which allowed smaller engines with more power for their weight. Watt himself was cautious about high pressure, but others pursued it.
Trevithick and the British steam carriage era
Richard Trevithick, a Cornish engineer, built a steam road carriage in 1801, sometimes called the “Puffing Devil,” which carried passengers up a hill in Camborne on Christmas Eve that year. A later London steam carriage followed in 1803. Trevithick soon moved on to railway locomotives, where the same technology found a more lasting home. The development of steam locomotives on rails, which could use smooth tracks, drew attention and capital away from road vehicles.
Still, in the 1820s and 1830s, a number of British inventors built steam carriages meant for regular passenger service. Goldsworthy Gurney’s carriages were tested and used on routes including a service between Cheltenham and Gloucester in 1831. Walter Hancock built a series of steam omnibuses in London in the 1830s. These vehicles carried paying customers, and for a time it looked as though steam coaches might compete with horse-drawn ones.
Why steam carriages struggled in Britain
Several factors worked against them. Turnpike trusts, which ran toll roads, charged steam carriages far higher tolls than horse-drawn coaches, on the grounds that the heavy machines damaged road surfaces. Rough roads also shook the vehicles, and boilers sometimes failed. Railways, meanwhile, offered faster and more comfortable long-distance travel. Later legislation set strict limits on road locomotives. The Locomotive Act of 1861 and the Locomotives on Highways Act of 1865, often called the Red Flag Act because it required a person to walk ahead of the vehicle, restricted speeds to very low levels. The 1865 act was relaxed in 1896, a point at which gasoline vehicles were already appearing. Historians still debate how much these laws slowed British road development compared with other countries, since similar vehicles also struggled for technical and economic reasons.
Steam on the Continent and in America
Elsewhere, steam road vehicles kept developing. In France, Amédée Bollée built a steam omnibus called “L’Obéissante” in 1873, with independent front-wheel steering that was advanced for its day. Léon Serpollet developed flash boilers that produced steam very quickly, reducing the long wait to start the engine. In the United States, the Stanley brothers built steam cars from 1897, and the Stanley Steamer became one of the best-known early American automobiles. A Stanley steam car set a speed record at Ormond Beach, Florida, in 1906, going faster than 120 miles per hour, which was remarkable for the time.
Steam cars were quiet, smooth and powerful, with no gearbox needed. Their problems were practical: they needed time to heat the boiler, a supply of water, and attention to fuel burners and gauges. Owners also worried about boiler safety. Many makers improved the designs, but by the 1910s the field was shrinking.
Why gasoline won
The internal combustion engine had a different set of advantages. A gasoline engine could start quickly, run for a long distance on a tank of fuel, and did not need a boiler. Fuel was also becoming easier to get as petroleum refining expanded to supply kerosene, then gasoline. The engineering work of Otto, Daimler, Maybach and Benz in the 1870s and 1880s produced a compact engine that suited vehicles, and the technical problems of ignition and carburetion were solved over time.
Several events in the 1910s tipped the balance. Cadillac’s electric starter in 1912 removed the cranking problem. Henry Ford’s Model T, built with a gasoline engine and sold at falling prices, dominated the market. And where steam had been competitive in 1900, by the early 1920s it had faded from the mass market, though specialist builders such as Doble continued making expensive, high-quality steam cars for some years.
What remained
Steam road vehicles continued in niches, including traction engines used on farms and for hauling, steam rollers for road building, and heavy steam wagons for freight in some countries. The idea of external combustion engines in cars has been revisited from time to time, but without commercial success.
The shift from steam to gasoline was not a clean replacement of one inferior technology by a better one. In the 1890s and early 1900s, steam, electric and gasoline cars each had real strengths. Gasoline eventually won on convenience, range and cost, helped by cheap fuel and mass production.